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Nostalgic childhood memories can reduce your pain

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Peer-reviewed: This work was reviewed and scrutinised by relevant independent experts.

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Remember that great time when you were a kid and weren't in pain? Well you might want to the next time you have a boo-boo, as Chinese researchers have discovered that reflecting on fond memories can reduce our perceptions of pain. They set up a bunch of participants in brain scanning machines and showed them either nostalgia-inducing images or corresponding images from modern life while slowly increasing the amount of pain they were in. The participants said they felt less pain when the memories were flowing, and the effect worked best on the smallest of owies. Additionally, the researchers found that two areas of the participants' brains that are related to pain perception were less active with the nostalgia images.

Journal/conference: JNeurosci

Link to research (DOI): 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2123-21.2022

Organisation/s: Chinese Academy of Sciences, China

Funder: This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (32100861, 81871436, 82072010, 82030121, 32000775), the National Social Science Fund of China (17ZDA324), and the Magnetic Resonance Imaging Research Center, Institute of Psychology, CAS.

Media release

From: Society for Neuroscience

Nostalgia Can Relieve Pain

Viewing images from childhood reduces pain perception

Reflecting on fond memories goes a step beyond making you feel warm and fuzzy: nostalgia can reduce pain perception. Nostalgia decreases activity in pain-related brain areas and decreases subjective ratings of thermal pain, according to research recently published in JNeurosci.

Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences measured the brain activity of adults with fMRI while the participants rated the nostalgia levels of images and rated the pain of thermal stimuli. The nostalgic images featured scenes and items from an average childhood, like a popular candy, cartoon TV show, and schoolyard game. Images in the control condition depicted corresponding scenes and items from modern life. Viewing nostalgic images reduced pain ratings compared to viewing control images, with the strongest effect on low intensity pain.

Viewing nostalgic images also reduced activity in the left lingual gyrus and parahippocampal gyrus, two brain regions implicated in pain perception. Activity in the thalamus, a brain region involved in relaying information between the body and the cortex, was linked to both nostalgia and pain ratings; the thalamus may integrate nostalgia information and transmit it to pain pathways. Nostalgia may be a drug-free way to alleviate low levels of pain, like headaches or mild clinical pain.

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